Green technology also includes information technology, of course. Take the core military function of logistics. Everyone knows that a modern military can’t function without abundant and secure supplies, including energy. But today’s military is being asked to go deeper, into existing buildings, vehicle fleets, supply chains and third-party contracting relationships, and to seek out and destroy inefficiencies wherever they occur -- all while maintaining their core readiness capability.

That’s how Dave Bartlett, vice president of industry solutions at IBM, describes the goals of a massive new project with the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense. Over the next sixteen months or so, IBM will be deploying its Tririga real estate portfolio sustainability management 6software, derived from the startup.

IBM bought Tririga in 2011, and has since built on the San Francisco-based startup’s core real estate portfolio management capabilities. For example, IBM has used its in-house sensor and interval meter data sampling and monitoring technology to create a new application, called Tririga Energy Optimization, that uses data analysis to seek out previously unknown opportunities for efficiency, as well as ranking them against one another in terms of ROI, Bartlett said.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense is close to the U.S. Air Force in terms of scale, Bartlett said. The British Army, Royal Navy and RAF control some 4,000 sites around the world, including about 900 square miles and 45,000 buildings in the U.K., as well as bases and properties in Germany, Cyprus, Norway, Poland, Kenya, Canada, Belize, Nepal, Oman and the Falkland Islands.

That makes for a big, complicated project. IBM and the MOD have until April 2014 to deliver a “number of capability releases,” that is, suites of applications for use in the real world. MOD is also undergoing a £7 billion ($11.2 billion) overhaul of its IT infrastructure over the same timeframe, which could lead to further integration with IBM’s Tririga platform, Bartlett noted.

Stay tuned for more defense contractors and energy services giants to get involved in big military base efficiency projects. The U.S. DOD spent about $15.2 billion on energy in 2010, and while three-quarters of that was spent on transportation (gasoline and jet fuel), facilities still made up the remaining quarter, or about $3.8 billion in annual spend -- a big target to tackle. The Pew Charitable Trusts has projected that U.S. military green spending could reach $10 billion by 2030, including biofuels, batteries, renewable energy and other technologies.